Power Stone 2

When rumors flew about Power Stone 2's four-player capability, it was hard to wrap the mind around the idea of an even more frantic Power Stone title. Capcom has managed to amaze, astound, and confuse with this new entry into the console party/fighting game genre.

When rumors flew about Power Stone 2's four-player capability, it was hard to wrap the mind around the idea of an even more frantic Power Stone title. Capcom has managed to amaze, astound, and confuse with this new entry into the console party/fighting game genre.

The Power Is Yours!
The original Power Stone broke ground with its go-anywhere gameplay and arena style fighting action. The game resembled a madcap Jackie Chan brawl more than a martial arts contest and left a lot of people confused. Rather than forcing folks to memorize crazy combos, Power Stone relied upon your ability to adapt and react to win. Power Stone 2 keeps that tradition alive, throwing in two more onscreen characters and massive, interactive battlegrounds. The object is still to grab three power stones and transform into some sort of super-being, capable of unleashing massive mounds of whoop-ass on your foes. Power Stone 2 definitely seems an improvement over the original in every way.

Still, there's just something in the way of this being the perfect game. Perhaps the levels are simply too big, or the action runs a little too fast, and you might long for the old days when you're playing Power Stone 2. You don't get the same feeling of control in these huge, disaster-filled arenas that you got from throwing tables or ripping down columns in the first Power Stone. While you can play as many as four players at once, you may find yourself keeping that number down to two, just to keep the chaos to a minimum. The game includes enough modes to keep you busy (Arcade, Classic, 1-on-1, and Adventure), but pretty much remains the same.

Chaos Is Power
Power Stone 2 is an exercise in controlled chaos. The simple controls guarantee that you'll be able to jump right in and start kicking ass right away, but the sheer insanity of a match may make you forget how to fight. If you get the hang of all the nuances of control (catching thrown objects, operating all the power ups, etc.), then you still have the random bits of the stages to contend with. The effects of the power stones aren't as cheap as they once were, but clever players will still find an advantage in nearby cannons, tanks, and traps.

PS2's presentation is much like that of the original, only much larger and more frantic. The levels move in sequence; for example, a trap-filled dungeon scene becomes an Indiana-Jones-style boulder chase, then finishes in a secret room. Because there's so much going on onscreen, the camera likes to pull back so far that your fighters become tiny little packets of movement. The simple, colorful graphics work well enough, but when you can hardly tell which character you are, all that art design goes to waste. The sound also suffers from an annoyingly condescending announcer and generic "adventure" music.

Welcome To The Power Stone World
Power Stone 2 is everything you've hoped for since the original, with madcap action and four-player mayhem, but a little more depth and less confusion would have rounded this title out nicely. As it is, PS2 is a great multiplayer title that should bring smiles to the faces of Power Stone junkies across the country.

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